The 70's were a tumultuous time in Chile but one of the more positive things to come out of that era was a powerful and professional sounding National voice under the Pinochet regime. The Voice of Chile was a byproduct of that era and I was blessed to find a very clean recording of them from the Spring of 1979. Received on the west coast on my DX150B and a simple inverted-L antenna - recorded on an old mono cassette recorder from Sears that was bought in 1971!

Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Colin Newell, who shares two recordings from the late 1970s of the pirate radio station RX4M The Voice of Clipperton.

Colin recorded both of these station IDs from British Columbia, Canada, using his cassette recorder. Colin also notes that he may be the only person to have ever recorded RX4M off-air. RX4M was inducted into the North American Pirate Radio Hall Of Fame in 2011. The following is an excerpt from an article written by Andrew Yoder on the NA Pirate Radio Hall of Fame site :

RX4M (Radio Experiment on 40 Meters) put in more time and hours to overcome obscurity, only to quickly fall back into obscurity, thanks to a pirate-unfriendly location in Washington State. Even by the mid-‘80s, few DXers or pirate listeners had heard RX4M, and few remembered it.

The first difficulty for RX4M to overcome was the poor communications of the late ‘70s. When the station began broadcasting in August 1979, there was no Internet and all DX news either was discovered via monthly bulletin or magazine, meaning a minimum delay of two months for information to be reported.

The next problem was the Pacific Northwest. At the time, very few shortwave DXers and almost no pirate listeners were located in the region. Some young pirate listeners were networking in southern California, toward Los Angeles, but even that was a long haul from the Seattle area.

Despite a nightly broadcast schedule and boasting two transmitters (20 and 100 watts), no DXers in either NASWA or the Newark News Radio Club (two of the largest shortwave clubs of the time, and two of the best for pirate news) reported RX4M until April 1980 on 7370 kHz.

The few listeners who remember RX4M know it as possibly the only North American pirate to operate with a regular shortwave station, like a licensed outlet. It was on nightly from *0550-0630* UTC with a variety of programs produced by different station staff: News with Tony Giles, Post Office Box 80 with Aaron Richardson, DX Forum with Mickey Anderson, Let’s Talk Technical with Larry Adams, and the Good Morning Show with Jerry Nelson. Other time slots were filled with old-time radio programs, such as Burns & Allen, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee & Molly, Sherlock Holmes, Fred Harris & Alice Faye.

[...]RX4M, the Voice of Cliperton, was never heard again and no shortwave pirate since has adopted its style. At a time when many DXers were bitterly anti-pirate, many reporters said that RX4M programming sounded very professional.

After a 2005-13 hiatus, I have rediscovered a childhood hobby and your reviews have helped me find my way to the post-Sony portable shortwave radio markets.

First, I obtained my “childhood dream” radio (Sony ICF 2001D), because at the time I made these recordings I was still in school and 1300 DM would have equaled over 1 year of pocket money, so a Supertech SR16HN had to do. I thought I got some fine results with this Sangean-Siemens re-branded receiver then, using a CB half-length antenna, a random wire, and much endurance.

I kept regular logs throughout the years, wrote to 50 international and pirate stations for QSL and compiled this cassette.

A few years before I got that trusty SR16HN, however, I recorded a few number stations (such as G3, Four Note Rising Scale etc) with an ordinary radio cassette recorder, and in 1991 I put them onto this tape as well. The other recordings are done with the same radio placed right in front of the SR 16HN.

Feel free to make use of these recordings. Most of it are the well-known international state-owned shortwave stations of the past; plus European pirates; plus number stations; and at the end, a few (off-topic) local Am and FM stations interval signals.

As I said, this collection I made shortly after the Wende/reunification period, when all former-GDR state broadcasters changed their names, sometimes more than once.

Please continue your good work on the blogs! Weather permitting I am often outside cycling and always have the tiny Sony ICF 100 with me (which I call my then-student’s dream radio of the later 90ies).

The Shortwave Radio Audio Archive

The Shortwave Radio Audio Archive (SRAA) is a collection of shortwave radio recordings that you can download or listen to as a podcast. The collection grows every day and includes both historic recordings and current recordings from the shortwave radio spectrum.

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